Odd jobs...

Lately it seems like I'm doing a lot of odd jobs. This week it was shocks, proposals, and dog houses. The Ford pickup has well over a 100K miles on it, so it always needs maintenance. This time it was shock absorbers. Driving around on our frost heaved roads, it wallowed around like a boat in a storm. Would that make me a drunken sailor? The truck also seemed to settle a lot with the dog boxes on it last winter. Thought it'd be a good idea to beef up the springs with load leveler shocks. Of course nobody up here carries them in stock so had to order online. They were shipped and arrived promptly, so that's something. The only problem was that the spring on the load levelers extends the shock's mount down, well beyond the bracket where the old shock mounted. So had to jack the axle down (away) from the frame to get enough separation to fasten the lower shock mount. On the rear ones, the brake drum was almost touching the ground before the bracket and shock aligned close enough to thread the bolt. Once the shock was hooked up and the truck jacked back down, the shock springs compressed quite a bit and the truck height was only about an inch more. And while the ride is OK, it's noticeably stiffer on bumps.

Didn't think to get a shot of the floor jack balanced on the axle to force the bracket down enough to align with the new shocks. Probably looked pretty weird.

Then I got a call from a former colleague at work, who was concerned about a project he thought was  being mismanaged, so wanted my input. After talking to him for awhile, did some research online, then wrote and sent off a proposal outlining suggested work. We'll see where that goes. I expect nowhere.
Also been working on dog houses. It seems like the last few dogs we've taken in are quite long bodied, so started making longer dog houses. That's left several old ones not being used. So rather than keep building new, longer houses, decided to try and lengthen the older ones. Since it would take a major disassembly with lots of newer parts to do it right, got the idea of just taking the front and back off and adding spacers that'd make the house several inches longer without so much extra work and materials. We'll see how that works out.

The spacers (scrap 1x2's) extended the length about an inch at each end. It'll be interesting to see if the dogs like this house any better than the older one